11 Comments

Straight to my wiki under the (somewhat ironic) title Sensitivity Training, which tries, it says, to track the untrackable. But this shows the climate blogosphere continuing to mature. Will that engineering level treatment emerge this way?

The boulder of high climate sensitivity to 2XCO2 that has been pushed uphill by the climate mainstream shows some signs of starting to roll back. The two cited empirical studies showing lower sensitivity get some independent support from Esper el al 2012, which suggests that a solar insolation decrease of 6 W/m2 only produced approximately 1C of cooling in the last two millennia. While others are busily engaged elsewhere, there seems to be a gradually coalescing picture of a climate that is in a regime in which it is highly damped with respect to changes in forcing.

I highly recommend Paul_K’s article. It isn’t just about climate sensitivity–it is also an audit. He finds that the 2 studies that claim a high sensitivity neglect to compare to all the data available (radiation balance vs surface temperature vs ocean heat). It is classic cherry picking. Nicely done.

However, the graph shows a number of incompatible data-types as each is in a different currency … and even if they weren’t you can’t just compare share values. So, what we did was arbitrarily scaled up the shares until they seemed to be a best fit.

My concern is that because we scaled them to make them “fit” … the predominant characteristic of “them all falling together”, might have much more than we think to do with how we treated the data rather any inherent characteristic of the data.

Chris,
Paul_K is an OK fellow: experienced, knowledgeable, and civil. If you have substantive questions to raise, why don’t you visit Lucia’s blog and raise them? Be forewarned before you comment, Paul is no dummy, and he will tell you straight out when you are clearly mistaken.